Entering Florida

Dad rode 216 miles since we last talked. All week long, the mornings have been about 45 degrees when Dad has headed out for the day.

On the 24th, he rode 63 miles to the depressed city of Darien, Georgia. He stayed in a motel next to a huge outlet mall with only 6 tenants. Most of the stores and restaurants were closed in that area.

What a pleasant thought.

He was happy to announce that the clicking sound finally disappeared. The bike store mechanic at the last shop he went to loosened the steering because it didn't want to turn well and he straightened the handlebars a bit. He doesn't know if that was related to the clicking sound, but it is gone. Yahoo!

The 25th was full of adventure on the 61 miles to Kingsland, Georgia. First, a crown came off his tooth on his lower left jaw at the end of lunch while he was eating a chocolate chip cookie. Luckily, there was a dentist in the same strip mall where he was having his lunch who had time to fix it. An hour and a half later, he was back on the road.

Later that day, he found out that the bridge was out on US17 and the detour for cyclist was 20 miles long, while the detour for cars and trucks was 2 miles long. He planned to make it to Yulee, Florida, that day, but with the detour he stayed in Kingsland.

The US 17 bridge over the St Mary's River is closed. Cars and trucks are detoured two miles west to I 95. Bicycles are detoured 20 miles east to US 301.

When he finally got to Yulee on the 26th, he found out the campground he was planning to stay at wasn't set up for tents. They wanted to charge him RV prices for setting up a tent on the lawn, so he continued on to Fernandina Beach, Florida, recording 72 miles that day. He spent 2 days trying to get to Yulee, only to find out it wasn't what he expected.

Welcome to Florida.

The 27th didn't go as planned either. He cycled 62 miles to a campground 6 miles north of St. Augustine, but after he checked in, he found out that there was a sewage leak and the water was not potable. He was asked to sign a paper acknowledging that he knows he needs to boil his water prior to drinking it. Dad didn't want to deal with that, so he rode the rest of the way to St. Augustine and spent 3 nights in a motel as he explored the city.

St. Augustine is a tourist town and Bill has enjoyed riding around visiting the attractions (the pictures below are in no particular order). The mornings have been cool and the afternoons pleasant. St. Augustine, in its long history, had once been a walled city. The gates used to close at midnight and if you were not inside the gates on time, then you would be stuck outside the city with the alligators and the graveyards. There are a lot of one-way roads there too. He discovered this on the 29th, when he rode 8 miles instead of 4 miles trying to get somewhere.